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Just because it’s been a shamefully long time since my last post doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing them in my head. It just means there’s lots to share, so I’ll keep it snappy.

What follows in the next few posts is a “Reader’s Digest” version of the last two month’s of retail encounters.

October 21, 2010I have to confess I’ve never been one for sloppy seconds, especially when it comes to clothes. I like my clothes to have that new-clothes smell and I love the snip of cutting off crisp tags.

But when my new friend Nurse V. invited me to the City Opera Thrift Shop‘s Fall Vintage Preview Sale, I decided to give secondhand clothes a second chance.

Walking into the Chelsea shop, Nurse V. reviewed the rules. First, we’d start upstairs in the sale section. We’d pause to look briefly at housewares, then tackle the rest of the second floor. Clothes at City Opera are organized by color, so we’d go through the reds, pinks, whites, and blues, then hit the shoes and bags, before making our way down to the first floor.

I realized right away this would be no evening of pawing through bins of stained duds at Goodwill; City Opera Thrift Shop is well supplied by opera buffs donating their barely worn Chanels and Pradas for the good of keeping New York in Puccini and Verdi.

Here are the highlights: A Lanvin dress, never worn. We carried it with us while we shopped, hoping it would wind up being a good price (it wasn’t tagged, and we had to ask), and knowing it wouldn’t be, but excited even to be thinking about buying a Lanvin frock.

City Opera Thrift Shop also sells true vintage pieces, and at least one coat and one dress I looked at bore the elegant scripted labels from Bonwit Teller, a store my mom used to talk about shopping at when she first moved to Boston in the 1960′s.

A vintage Saks coat with rhinestone buttons each of which took a full minute to button. It was a coat, it seemed, from the days when women didn’t have to go places in a hurry.

My almost-find was a Nanette Lepore sweater dress. It made it all the way to the register with me, before I did a mental scan of my closet and realized I did NOT need another sweater dress, no matter how cute it would look with knee high boots.

Though, despite the lack of a shopping bag in my hand, I felt like I was a winner too. See, this was the first real evening Nurse V. and I had hung out, and I rarely meet people who have my shopping staying power; most people I know poop out after just an hour of rack-raiding. Nurse V. is a true shopping pro, and you know that is a high, high compliment coming from Miss CinD.

Mom had stopped to inspect a black leather bag she knew almost right away was only so-so. While she was doing that, I happened to spot the most perfect brown handbag imaginable. Not too chocolate. Not too beige. Slouchy without being messy. Optimum number of pockets.

I held up the bag. “Oh,” my mom said. “I want it too!”

I said. “There’s only one.”

“I LOVE it,” she said.

“Well,” I said “what have I told you about not spending too much time trying to convince yourself that so-so things are worth it simply because the price is right? If you hadn’t been looking at that black bag, you’d have seen this awesome brown one.”

I am the educator in our shopping expeditions, having inherited a well-evolved shopping gene from my dad’s three sisters.

“You’re right,” she sighed. “Finders keepers.”

“That’s okay, I was joking. You take it.”

“No. You’ve been needing a brown bag and this one’s just perfect.”

We did the “you take it-no-you-take-it” for about half an hour. Then we decided I would buy the brown bag, and she would buy the black bucket purse we had both admired at the Barney’s outlet.

Fast forward about three years, to August, 2010: I have moved to New York and discovered the Fossil bag, still a wardrobe staple, is also the perfect New York bag. I have also had my heart stomped on, and adopted a cat I’ve named Eleanor.

Being a slightly neurotic new single cat mom, I take Eleanor for a full medical work-up. The vet sees something in El’s blood test and orders a urine test.

I won’t go into gory details, but the vet tells me to clean out Eleanor’s litter box, and not to refill it with cat litter. That way she’ll pee right onto the liner and I can collect the sample and bring it to the vet. Easy.

Note the pink cat bed, to match the pink blog.

So one night I clean out the litterbox. In the morning, I let Eleanor out of my room and figure she’ll make a beeline for her box.

But she doesn’t. I shower. Still no litterbox action. I make coffee. Then, as I’m about to leave for work, I see her.

Eleanor, crouching on my favorite brown Fossil purse with the optimal number of pockets. I’m so shocked I just stand there and watch as a small trickle spreads across the not-too-chocolate-not-too-beige leather.

Eleanor is usually so tidy she covers her food bowl with the corner of a towel when she’s done eating. But there she is peeing into my bag.

I spend the next half hour cleaning, disinfecting, or throwing away the contents of my bag. All the while Eleanor watches as though to say (and I realize I’m anthropomorphizing a bit here), “that’s what you get for messing with my toilette.”

To make matters grosser, I am determined to get this test over with, so I dump the liquid contents of the bag into a tupperware, and take it on the subway with me in a dainty Aveda bag as though I’ve stopped on my way to work to buy a $30 bottle of shampoo, instead of to drop off my cat’s urine at the vet’s office.

I call my mom, so we can share the laugh. (Can you really do much else but laugh when your cat squats and pees into your purse?)

“Nothing. It’s just… hmmm… guess you didn’t end up with that nice Fossil bag after all.”

“Forget it mom,” I say. “I am still the owner of the most perfect brown leather bag ever made. This is New York. I’m going to find a leather cleaner who will make this bag as nice as the day I bought it. And it will still be all mine.”

But it’s true. And broken heart aside, of all the shopping there is to be done, shoe shopping is probably about third on my list of favorites. And for reasons I’m about to outline below, shoe shopping is quickly dropping further down the list.

See, I realized soon after moving to New York that almost my entire shoe wardrobe is inappropriate for the city. I walk about a third of a mile to get to the subway in the morning, and about that same distance from the subway to my office. I do that same walk home. In there somewhere I climb four steep flights of stairs. I walk to buy lunch. I walk to the gym. I walk to the wine shop. It is the life many New Yorkers lead.

I know it’s good for you and all. Recent figures show New Yorkers can expect to live an average of nine months longer than their counterparts in other cities, and many scientists attribute this to the amount, and speed, New Yorkers walk.

I swear they were comfortable when I bought them.

But even though I have never been a fan of three-inch stilettos, over the past few years I’ve accumulatedI swear they were comfortable when I bought them. some much-beloved pairs of shoes and boots with kitten heels. (Even the name kitten heel makes me purr with delight.) My favorites are Jeffrey Campbell open-toe slingbacks (they’re so cute, I have them in black with patent leather trim, and gold with bronze trim. ). On the first warm day, I slipped them on, eagerly.

Wrong. By the time I had tottered all the way to the subway, I wanted to fling the shoes on the tracks.

Plus, many of my shoes with heels are tighter in the toes, and in the last few years, the genes of my grandma Orshokovsky have taken control of my feet, leaving me with unmistakeable bunions. When I wear heels these days, even low heels, my feet throb.

I’m the F to the E, R, G, the I, the E… I’m FergaliciousAnd let’s not even talk about my favorite find of last winter that I will probably have to give away— a pair of little zip up booties by the brand– wait for it– Fergalicious, by Fergie. Sigh. The heels are low, but they’re also thin. I work on a college campus paved in charming brick and cobblestone.

All I need is to be the new girl who gets her heel caught between two charming cobblestones and goes flying down the college walk.

So, I made a resolution.

From now on, it’s all flats, all the time.

This should be easy, right? Flats are in style.

Nuh uh. Here’s what happens when you go to a store looking for flats.

The only shoes you like at all, have high heels. In fact, you find yourself drawn to four-inch platforms, spiky pumps, wedge espadrilles. Anything but flats. At Nordstrom a few weeks ago, I went looking for brown sandals.

The patient saleslady brought me pair after pair of practical Merrel’s, Dansko’s, Clark’s. All undeniably comfortable. Yet, I felt as though they had been designed especially to make this recently-dumped thirtysomething with bunions feel like an old lady.

I settled finally on a pair of Steve Madden gladiator sandals, relatively stylish with a very low wedge heel. The stiff leather thong between my toes did cause a cut that got infected and took three weeks to heal, but hey, you can’t have everything.

I know I could wear sneakers to work, then change at my office. Remember Working Girl? But, pssst— no one really does that anymore. Plus, my new co-workers don’t seem to like me very much, which means I spend most of my day in my cubicle alone, with my feet tucked under my desk. Hardly worth lugging an extra pair of shoes.

I'm the F to the E, R, G, the I, the E... I'm Fergalicious

Hope springs eternal. Back in my closet they go.So about once a week I go through my shoe wardrobe longingly. Sometimes I even start my morning putting on my heels. I get as far as my front door. Sometimes, as far as the elevator. But inevitably I retreat home, open my shoe closet, and slip on some flats. I’ll try tomorrow, I tell myself.

There are few times in life when every stitch of clothing I own is clean at the exact same moment.

Most days, either my laundry bag is so full it resembles a piece of bad public art, or my laundry is done, but 60% of my work wardrobe is in hock at the dry cleaner’s.

However, some weeks, the planets just line right up.

Saturday, I started the weekend by picking up my dry cleaning (trying to ignore the fact that the $68 I had to fork over just to get my own clothes back could have bought the little dress I noticed at Brooklyn Industries). Then, Sunday night, I did my laundry.

That meant this week started with perfect symmetry — my t-shirts and workout clothes and my dresses and blouses, all at the same level of clean.

I woke up this morning thinking “There is not a piece of dirty clothing to be found in this house. Everything is aligned, harmonious. This is the week everything is going to go right.”

That pleasant thought lasted for exactly half an hour, until I happened upon my cat peeing into my second-favorite handbag.

I have a receipt I’ve been keeping in my wallet, dated April 11, 2010.

This date is significant. Here’s why.

On that Sunday, I wandered into a little shop in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I now live. The store was called Sweet Charity, and I was immediately a huge fan, not only because the owner gives a portion of her profits to animal rescue organizations (yay kitty cats!), but also because she goes out of her way to stock clothes for curvy women, since she herself is curvy.

I began thumbing through the sale rack (natch) and found a navy blue knit dress by Japanese designer Aoyama Itchome.

The dress hugged in all the right places, and blithely floated over the, ahem, wrong ones. There was a little tie at the top, a bit of embroidered embellishment, but aside from that it was perfectly simple and elegant.

I was already falling head over heels when the shop owner sealed the deal.

That did it. In case you don’t know (and if you don’t, shame on you), Joan Holloway is the busty redhead that all the men in the show drool over unabashedly.

She was also the favorite character of my then bf, who liked that she was clever and tough with a major dose of sexy.

This dress made me look like her? Sold.

I’m not saying I specifically bought it because I thought my bf would like it, but it did make it that much easier to carry that dress up to the register.

About three weeks later my bf broke up with me suddenly. I won’t go into the details (it had nothing to do with the dress)— this is a blog about clothes and shopping, after all.

Meantime, between those two events (buying the dress and being, well… um… dumped), the dress quickly became one of my go-to pieces. Over the next three weeks I wore it to a work event. I wore it to what turned out to be the last Friday night dinner we would ever share together. A couple days later I wore it to a birthday party for his nephew, not realizing then that I likely will not see this nephew, or any of the other three little ones, grow up.

So what does April 11th have to do with all this? Not much, I guess, except it was the last time I shopped with any kind of excitement or pleasure. It seems there’s nothing like a bad breakup to ruin a perfectly good Bloomingdale’s afternoon.

I’ve done a little shopping since, for necessities mostly, but somehow these days the pleasure has just evaporated. I’ve frankly never experienced anything like it. Ms. Crisis in Denim not wanting to shop?! Who could ever imagine? It would be like a dog saying ‘no thanks’ to a bone. But so it is.

At least all this drama has been good for my wallet, and I’ve taken up doing some shopping in my closet.

Which will be the subject of the next post. Crisis in Denims is, well, maybe having another kind of crisis, so this blog may have a slightly different feel. Though it will still be riotously funny, just like before.

Plus, Ms. Crisis in Denim lives in New York now. So if the urge to shop ever returns, she’ll be having many new sartorial adventures.

And you can still see all the old posts, so don’t worry.

Speaking of which: I was browsing through them the other day and came across one from March 2009, in which I wrote about my bf and how he asked me how many pairs of shoes I had. In this post, I wrote:

“I want this relationship to work, and I want it badly. I want it more than I wanted a Benetton sweatshirt for Hannukah in 8th grade, and that’s saying a lot.”

In the middle of the night the other night, I was awakened by a somewhat muffled thud. When I opened my closet, I saw that the entire right side shelving/hanging unit, where I hang all my dresses, pants and skirts, had collapsed.

Was it that one last, perhaps unnecessary, dress I bought that put my poor closet over the edge?

When the day began I was a bit apprehensive. Would my outfit be right? Would the other bloggers already all know each other? It was like the first day of sleep-away camp, circa 1988!

To ease my nervousness I told myself I’d just pop in for a few minutes, pick up some business cards, introduce myself to a couple bloggers, and quietly slip out. Wrong.

Hello, Lovelies. Where have you been all my life? These Pour La Victoire booties at Luna were a bit out of my price range, even with 25% off. Still, they are gorgeous and have inspired many a fantasy.

First off, the mixer was held at the fabulous Luna Boston handbag store (hello? handbag store?! It was like the venue was chosen especially pour moi!) on Newbury Street, and the first thing I saw was a sign offering all bloggers 25 percent off anything. Now THAT’S what I call hospitality.

Then, just as I was filling out my nametag, some excitement erupted outside. We all ran to see. It was the annual Santa Speedo Run making its way down Newbury Street in all its Spandex glory. Suffice it to say, we bloggers were all ready for a drink after that sighting.

The Santa Speedo Run ran just past the Fashion Blogger Mixer. It was a juxtaposition of sorts– people who love wearing clothes, and people who love, well, NOT wearing clothes.

Thank goodness for Hpnotiq. If it sounds like I’m shilling for a big alcohol company, well, I am, just a bit. It was just that they sent over such lovely bottles of baby-blue liquor, along with bartenders to make delicious concoctions such as the Roq Candy which was stirred up with a stick of pale blue rock sugar candy.

(By the way, it seems we all inadvertently enrolled in Hpnotiq’s “Night School for Girls” (Click on 12.12.2009 Luna Boston)– since there are plenty of photos of the festivities on the company’s website.)

After we’d all had a few sips of these yummy drinks, the place really got hopping.

A Necklush. I feel a Jones of the Week coming on.

I met Lei Ann of Give Me Platforms… or give me death (I know, I love the blog name too) who was very Zen in her Buddha necklace. She was also the lucky winner of a giveaway from Necklush, which makes super-sweet neckwear that is somewhere between necklace and scarf.

I met Jen of Jen Loves Kev and Amy, aka Punky of Punky Style, who also owns a very cool mobile vintage shop, Haberdash Vintage, and who supplied many of the goodies for the random drawing giveaway. (Yours truly won a crocheted clutch!). They, along with Liana of New Brahmin, organized the mixer and I, for one, can not gush enough with gratitude.

Blogstress after fabulous blogstress confessed to me that she’d been nervous about meeting everyone and all I could say was: ME TOO! I had thought I’d stand in the corner, sneak out when no one was looking, and have a whole afternoon to kill before my 5:30 p.m. bus to New York.

Boy, was I wrong. Sometime around 3:30 p.m. I glanced at my watch and realized the afternoon had flown by and I didn’t even have enough time to take advantage of the shopping deals some Newbury Street stores were offering bloggers. In fact, I barely had enough time to pick up my bags and head to New York City.

I just barely made my bus and on the ride down (well, before those blue drinks sent me into a deep sleep), I thought, I don’t care what anyone says about fashion and New York– there is no city with a more fabulous sisterhood of fashion bloggers than Boston.

The trip usually generates some good stories (one day I’ll tell you the leaving-my-car-keys-in-a-random-bag-I-tried-on-at-Banana Republic-then-didn’t-buy-story). And there’s something about the anticipation of dozens of potential fabulous finds waiting to be found, that gets us really excited.

Navigating the outlets is no easy feat. There’s a lot of wheat to be separated from chaff.

This year we were also distracted by a family illness and almost didn’t make it. Still, we re-worked and rescheduled yet again and managed to keep our annual retail appointment. It’s sort of our thing now, and we didn’t want to miss it.

A grocery cart! Full of clothes! Way better than a grocery cart full of paper towels and Diet Coke and baby carrots. Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I had the patience to fill a grocery cart this full in an ACTUAL grocery store.

Oh, and because I know you were wondering, we totally scored, though the number of purchases we made at the Saks outlet paled in comparison to the number of things jammed into that cart.

My mom bought two Saks brand long-sleeved waffle weave t-shirts for about $15 each. I bought a pair of skinny blue JBrands and a black and white-checked blouse.

We celebrated our purchases at the Lindt chocolate outlet, of course. It’s part of the tradition, after all.

Oh, ahem. I do, I guess. Or at least, I USED to. Because now I stand corrected. I made it into this week’s Links à la Mode, the Independent Fashion Bloggers roundup of the top 20 fashion blog links of the week. I’m thrilled, and in some fabulously good company, so check out my compatriots.

I’m not sure if it’s because American Thanksgiving is a week away, or because the blogosphere is ablaze with Kate Mosses’ unforgettable quote, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” but either way, I’ve got food on my mind. This week, you brought me the best kind of food–rich, decadent, and 100% calorie-free! That’s right–you delivered highly thoughtful posts on fashion, fashion blogging & communities, and more.

On a personal note, ferOHHHsh has asked that we share her post about her close friend’s near-fatal accident. I believe that the fashion community is one of surprising strength, dignity, caring and compassion, and that it was worth sharing. We’re sending your friend speedy thoughts for a wonderful recovery!

Links à la Mode : November 19th

Crisis in Denim: – Crisis in Denim: I make gentle fun of a Banana Republic ‘rewards’ card I received in the mail, that seems designed to make me think I accomplished something by shopping at BR and earning ‘rewards’ points, by riffing on the president’s Yes We Can slogan.

You. You selected the three best pairs of wool trousers out of a dozen styles and sizes. Yes You Did.

You tried them on with low heels and high heels, jackets and sweaters, to create the perfect outfit. Yes You Did.

You browsed the sale racks, searching for marked-down basics like shells and t-shirts, to fill out your wardrobe. Yes You Did.

You shopped strategically, passing up things you knew wouldn’t fit or that you didn’t need, asking the salesperson to show you the latest stock. Yes You Did.

Later, you helped your boyfriend find the perfect cranberry-colored sweater and wool trousers, then charged it to your BR card so he could get another 25 percent off and you would get the points. Yes You Did.

Actually, I am getting a bit misty-eyed just thinking of how much shopping I have accomplished. Thanks BR. You’ve inspired me. Still, I know I can’t grow complacent. To paraphrase that same election night speech: “There is so much more [shopping] to do!”